CES was last weekend, and though highlights range anywhere from a TV that falls off your wall if its battery dies to a car that shows other people the weather as you drive past them, one of the announcements I found most interesting was a new software feature on LG's 2023 TV lineup called "Personalized Picture Wizard."
This feature allows you to customize your TV picture settings to your liking by showing you a few different mini photo galleries and asking you to select which photos you most like the look of, which is data that LG's software then analyzes to determine your optimal picture settings.
This all sounds fine and dandy and is largely on-trend; tech companies are hitting a plateau in their hardware innovation, which means the main place they can continue adding value is in the software, and one of the simplest ways to do this is to keep giving users more ways to customize the software to their liking. You can describe the last two if not three major releases of iOS with the sentence, "You are now allowed to change things that you weren't allowed to change before."
The piece of this"Personalized Picture Wizard" feature that I find most interesting though is that we know exactly what it will eventually lead to: every LG TV owner having a more over-bright, over-saturated picture than a sixth-grade girl's first Instagram post. Just like how we often perceive louder music to sound better, we often perceive brighter and more saturated images to be better as well. But they're not. At least not always. Having an over-bright, over-saturated TV probably looks lovely until you are faced with your first dark, depressing drama scene and the color scheme still makes it look like Candy Land. Filmmakers shoot their movies and shows with the hope that viewers at home will watch them on a screen the shows all the highlights and shadows and colors and everything as the filmmaker intended. "Personalized Picture Wizard" chews and spits out this entire idea.
It's not that I really care that much about TV picture quality that I need to stay up at 11 pm on a Tuesday night preaching about picture purism. But this does raise a fascinating question: who deserves the right to exercise taste? Should consumers be allowed to customize all their software and hardware to suit their own personal preferences, or should companies be pushing their own taste onto their customers? LG is clearly placing themselves in the former camp with this new feature, but other tech companies like Apple have long prided themselves on bringing a stronger perspective on the user experience to their products and giving customers far less flexibility on what they can change.
And I personally tend to side with the latter camp more often than not. I think if there's one constant throughout the history of capitalism it's that the public has bad taste. That's why Crocs still exist. It sounds pretentious to say, "People need to be taught what good taste is," but people need to be taught what good taste is. If we all choose to always stick with what was most obviously appealing, we'd all still be drinking grape juice instead of wine. We need some brands to have a strong enough perspective on their user experience that they challenge customers into adopting what the company believes the best experience is rather than what is most readily attractive to the consumer.
Do we need LG to be one of these brands? Not necessarily. But I don't want every TV brand to adopt this "Personalized Picture Wizard" feature. You're the experts in TV. Teach me how I should be watching it.
Comments